For Margaret
Today I am thinking of my dear friend Margaret who died last month. Today would have been her 98th Birthday. She was married on Christmas Eve and her younger son was born on New Year's Day. She was born 7 1/2 months before WWI broke out. Imagine all she lived through in her life. I learned so much by being her close friend. I miss her greatly, but always the memory is warm and sweet. ♥
Dr. Dean is right up there, eh?
ReplyDeleteYes, listener, time flies. My father's mother made him a sled using barrel staves and he caught heck for riding it downhill right under a horse pulling a carriage. My mother remembered going to the Panama Pacific Exposition in 1915, and my landlord in Santa Cruz remembered seeing an army pilot flying an airplane up and down the midway there and deciding he would join the Army to get into aviation ["avi-" pronounced as in "(h)ave-ee-"]. Young folks often think I am pulling their legs when I say I remember coal oil lanterns, gas lights, party lines with magneto telephones, sad irons, bathing in a tin tub in the kitchen, outhouses and houses without electricity, but it's true. I don't remember any houses with dirt floors, but my mother told me some folks thereabouts had them. (The fastidious housekeepers with dirt floors would cover same with clean pine needles and change them from time to time.) My step-grandmother grew up in a soddy in Nebraska--she said they played a lot of cards during the winter; they were snowed in for months. Lord have mercy, things have changed so fast.
Excellent progress with the sartorius (tailor) muscle in my right leg. The physical therapist approves.
Wonderful tribute, listener. I 'spect you were tonic to her also.
ReplyDeleteMy dad, born 1909, lived a significant part of his childhood in a house with dirt floors and oiled paper windows.
http://eatapyzch.blogspot.com/2005/10/bluebell.html
Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert skewer Super-PACs:
ReplyDeletehttp://politicalwire.com/archives/2012/01/18/mocking_super_pacs.html
Fond thanks for the Bluebells link, puddle. Such a sweet story and sentiment. And now I am missing two friends, seeing dear jc's post at the bottom!! ♥
ReplyDeleteGreat experiences to have the memory of! I thank you for reminding me of what life was life not so long ago. Our dear old Aunt Evelyn (who lived to be 99.5) told us of seeing the roads plowed with horses, too. We have it so easy.
ReplyDeleteWith maybe one exception. I've never owned a snowblower and don't really like them. Just as golf is a good walk spoiled, to me a snowblower disrupts the pristine silence of a storm.
That said, we have one at the Library and it's a lot faster to use than a shovel (especially the motley shovel provided). We got about 10" of snow Friday night. On Saturday the temp was 4F and the wind was rising from 5 to 11 with gusts higher (to 29mph, they say). I arrived at the Library 25 minutes early (we don't get paid for that), shoveled out the walks and put down some safe salt. I did this myself because my coworker is 10 years older than me and hasn't been well lately. When I came into work on Tuesday there was a note saying we HAVE TO use the snowblower now, because the snow froze hard over the weekend and made additional clearing of the walkways difficult.
So, keep me in your thoughts and prayers on Monday because I am going to stand my ground. This is the first time since I took this job that I have not been willing to do anything that's asked of me. I am the person (and the only person) who collects and sets out the trash. I cover books (another coworker refuses to) and I even screwed up my courage and learned how to use the big paper slicer. But I am unwilling to use the snowblower in single digit temps when there's a wind that could take the snow that the blower tosses and throw it into my face! I checked the stats for Saturday and on a 4F degree day you can get hypothermia in 30 minutes. With a wind of 20mph you can get hypothermia in 10 minutes. And that doesn't factor in wet snow blowing on your face! It's just not safe or sane and I'm not going to promise to use the snowblower under just any conditions.
I think I won't be alone in my concern, and I think the Library Director will be reasonable about it. But I don't know for sure, as she was the one who had difficulty removing the rest of the snow on Monday.
BTW, it's not all on my head as the Library was also open on Sunday and apparently the folks who worked that day didn't use it either. LOL!
P.S.: Monday is our monthly staff meeting.
ReplyDeleteI love what they're doing. It's brilliant! Be sure to see the Colbert Report from last Thursday in which Colbert turns the SuperPAC over to Stewart.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/405895/january-12-2012/1-12-12-in--60-seconds
Rats. What I wanted to offer there was the entire show from January 12th. See it if you can. Those clips don't show the depth of what was discussed about SuperPACs that day, but it was very revealing.
ReplyDeleteThe jc addendum didn't escape me either. Was thinking how wonderful of the nets to keep memories alive like this.
ReplyDeleteLovely front page post, listener.
ReplyDeleteSis is at the hospital as I write. Not sure if she'll have the mammogram and sonogram both today, but think so. Please keep her in your thoughts today, everybody.
Phil talked about shoveling coal as a youngster. And he was born in 1950 in small town Illinois. I'm a spoiled city girl myself. But my dad (stepfather) grew up without indoor plumbing or electricity. He was born in 1933, but the problem was the remoteness and difficult mountain terrain of his family's farm. It wasn't till the 70s that the technology existed to provide indoor plumbing. I remember Dad and Uncle Red laying the new, flexible piping.
ReplyDeleteI miss JC.
ReplyDeleteShe's right there, Cat.
ReplyDeleteYa. Me, too. She left one big hole in my heart on her going. Some things some times one just doesn't understand. She certainly did more in one brief life than might be expected of anyone. Maybe she just finished the test early, and left the room.
ReplyDeletePrayers will be with you! Much better thing to take a stand on than not covering books, lol!
ReplyDeleteBTW, DFA is black today in aid of supporting the strike against PIPA/SOPA.
ReplyDeleteOK, here's the report:
ReplyDeleteBoth m-gram and s-gram performed. Large, irregular mass, biopsy to be done. The doctor told her there is a less than 5% chance of its being malignant. She's still unsettled though. To call GP tomorrow and see how she wants to proceed. So far, so good. But keep besieging the heavens, please.
Maybe...with a great bi gold star.
ReplyDeleteFirefox too. That is to say Mozilla. I signed the petition and posted it on FB.
ReplyDeleteThere's an epigram (Or is that epigraph? No matter how often I look them up I can't keep them straight) to Breaking Dawn the fourth and final book of The Twilight Saga. It says something like, "Childhood is the world where no one ever dies." If that is so, then childhood is blessed indeed.
ReplyDeleteYes, geography matters. I was born in 1936 in Pine Bluff, Arkansas (1940 population 18,000). You may think that's small, but it's big enough to count as a city. Much more modern than where Alan was growing up a decade or so later. We had coal oil (kerosene) lamps in the house, but only as backup for when the electricity went out. Indoor plumbing was the norm, although I believe there were some very poor people who didn't have it. Cast iron tub in the bathroom, but no shower (a luxury I fell in love with when I encountered it in my college dorm). And I have no clue what a sad iron may be.
ReplyDeleteUntil after WW II, though, a wood stove was our main source of heat, supplemented by a gas space heater in the living room. We got a gas floor furnace after the war. No coal, of course, because this was Arkansas -- the nearest gas wells were less than 100 miles away.
I know, I shared with you on facebook. I had a copyright run in years ago, and they're HARD to enforce. Deal is, the law as it stands now is right: it *should* be hard to enforce.
ReplyDeleteKnocking on heaven's door. For sure.
ReplyDeleteA sad iron, was one of those solid (and heavy) irons that were heated on the top of a wood or coal stove.
ReplyDeleteJust sent:
ReplyDeleteDear Senator Pat,
Thank you for your helpful page: http://leahy.senate.gov/press/press_releases/release/?id=fa72c841-0f44-40b8-bd88-b4ad106f82fc. I have presented it to friends who are up in arms about PIPA and SOPA, asking them to please articulate their concerns rather than hyping their fears. My friends, including active, aware Vermonters, tell me they honestly do not believe that you understand the full extent of potential, undesired consequences from this legislation, and they clearly do not want it. While I have more trust in your reading of the bill(s) involved, I must conclude that the “We the people” part of this endeavour is not ready for this legislation at this time. Congress has yet to sell this to the American people. Something needs to be added at the forefront of the lengthy legalese in the bill(s) that clarifies the intent of the legislation to reassure We the people that our simple sharing of ideas, links, and so on will indeed not be prosecuted.
If there is some way to address the larger internet concerns first and the smaller concerns separately, the most vital anti-piracy aspects of the legislation could yet be salvaged in the near term. Otherwise, I feel it is not the right time for this effort.
Thanks so much for listening,
Would that it were so, Cat. Little Ally is holding her own, but we've seen a number of her counterparts go way too early. It blows my mind that babies are sometimes born with cancer.
ReplyDeleteI knew it, puddle! Don't know how, but I knew it. My Mom had one of those, though I've never heard it called that.
ReplyDeleteWe heated with a wood stove until 1998! :-)
ReplyDelete~ ♥ ~
ReplyDeleteOh, it sure *is* unsettling!! Nothing like it. I knew I'd be nervous when I had to go in for a "specialised sonogram", so I took along a CD player with headphones and listened to Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons." For me that was calming, soothing music and reminded me of the beauty in life, so I wouldn't lose touch with it and descend into fear. It almost worked, too. 8-)
ReplyDeleteKnocking nothin'. I busted on through and I'm not takin' No for an answer!
ReplyDeleteGorgeous, listener, well done! I got to practice my reasoning with my kid tonight, who'd read our exchange on fb. Finally came down to: if someone publishes your poem without your permission, the way the law reads now, if you can *prove* malicious intent, you may get a judgment; if you can't prove intent, you CAN get damages ($1 per violation = if a newspaper publishes 50,000 copies with the poem in it, even if not malicious, that's a $50,000 judgment.) ~~ but you can't just shut their business down. And having someone (even the US gov) shut you down without even a trial? Not gonna float. And threaten others into shunning you with the same threat of shut down? Chilling indeed.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm getting less enamoured of it as the night goes on. I wrote to Bernie and also Peter Welch. We'll see what tomorrow brings, but it looks like they're going to back off of it. Some of the supporters have withdrawn their support.
ReplyDelete